LinkedIn has announced some changes to the way LinkedIn Groups work, which I think will make Groups more useful. If the changes work as expected, it should help to reduce the levels of spam in groups, and encourage more real discussion and engagement.

Among the features changing – due to be rolled out in the next couple of weeks – are:

• Making all Groups either Standard (showing up in search results, and any member can invite one of their 1st degree connections to join) or Unlisted (invisible to search, and only the Group owner and managers can invite members).
• All Group discussions will now be private, so conversations won’t be visible to non-members. Groups will now require that you be a member to contribute to conversations. Both changes should help encourage participation and reduce spam discussions.
• No contributions will require manager approval now – you will be able to post instantly in a Group you belong to. This should help people feel their content is seen by other members quickly. However, owners and managers will still be able to remove content or place individual members into moderation if needed, and any Group member will still be able to flag inappropriate content.  LinkedIn’s filters will also put any ‘spammy’ promotional content into moderation queue automatically.
• You will be able to add images and ‘tag’ fellow members to your LinkedIn discussions.
• And probably the most important improvement for most LinkedIn Group members is that LinkedIn will only send you one email with a digest of all of your group discussions (will highlight only the most popular and recent discussions) instead of an email from each Group!

There are some other changes too — For more details, see here.

Do you think these changes will encourage you to get more involved in LinkedIn Groups? I’d love to hear your views.